


No, They Dream of Horses

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Jakebot - Freeform, M/M, Post-Apocalyptic, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 02:48:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dirk Strider lives alone in a Post-Reckoning World, dreaming of a boy long lost to the transient cruelties of apocalypse, and waiting for the day the skeletal construct of metal and wire beneath his hand will be enough to fill the void that his lover left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is just something angst and AU-y I thought of one night. Warnings for character death and gore and the like. Enjoy!
> 
> Also, the "Reckoning" here is ambiguous. It could be related to SBURB, it could not be. It could be meteoroids, it could be just a name for the onset of nuclear war....it's purposefully up to interpretation.

 

 

I.

 

The carapaces are out in full force today. You're ambushed as you're coming home, your arms laden with canned meat and vegetables scavenged from a heretofore undiscovered nook inside one of the local supermarket ruins. The first band you easily dispatch, but the second and third waves take your battle weary body by surprise, and you only _just_ manage to subdue them. Your arm breaks when you smash your fist into a carapace skull, and once you manage to limp "home" to your shoddy cabin you spend the next three hours fixing it, tinkering with the wires and the flimsy metal paneling until you can finally _feel_ your fingers again. 

You flex your hand, listening to the screech and pop of the irregular metal parts grinding against one another. You get up from your workbench, massaging the aching flesh next to where the screws and wires graft the arm into your shoulder socket. You feel your calves and back strain and tear as you rise--a bodily casualty of your strife with the carapacians. 

It's just another typical day for you in the Post-Reckoning world. Another brush with death. Another broken robot arm, another semi-expired can of beans, another day looking at the symbol you'd carved into the beaten metal shell of your arm and wishing Jake was still here with you to make it not hurt so damn _bad._   

Your mechanical fingers knead into your brow, your human arm wrapped securely around your torso to suppress the sick feeling rising up inside you. Somedays you wished you hadn't carved that symbol into your arm, because somedays you feel it would be easier to forget. Forget about Jake. Forget about what had happened. Forget what you had done to him. How you had _failed_ him. 

 

 

II. 

 

It'd been a foolish mistake. On your part or on Jake's was still unclear, but years of living alone has convinced you that there must have been _something_ you could have done. You could have moved faster. You could have shouted _look out_ sooner. You could have been more on your toes while the two of you were traveling back through the brush to the cabin. You could have decided not to go out foraging for food that day. You could have done a million things, each of which would have slightly altered the present timeline that you'd been stuck with.

But you hadn't done any of those other million things, you had shouted too late and moved too slowly and before you'd known it a carapace had appeared out of the trees before Jake and brought its misshaped mace down upon his skull with an audible _crack_. 

It'd taken you a moment to fully register what had happened, but once you saw Jake collapse in a bleeding heap on the ground, worthless worthless _worthless why did you go out for food today_ cans of meat and potatoes scattering around him, you'd howled and sprinted forward, your sword making short work of the carapace's neck before it'd even began to turn at your scream. 

You'd ran and skidded into a crouch at Jake's side, hands poised over him and unsure what to do, how to fix this and make it right, and Jake hadn't been moving and there had been too much blood on his face and matted in his hair. You'd seen blood countless times before but this time it was Jake, and it wasn't just a tiny cut or gash, this had been serious, this had been _bad_ \--

You should have known that moving him would only cause him pain, but you had picked him up anyway and ran home even as he moaned and clutched at your shirt and shook. 

After laying him on his bed you'd tried to clean his wound, somehow patch the cracked and bleeding fissure running from the base of his skull to his crown, but you'd known. Even after he'd stopped bleeding and stopped moaning you'd known. His breath had grown even and he'd laid completely still, seemingly asleep but you _knew_ , you knew better. You'd held his barely warmed hand and sobbed and apologized over and over and begged him to wake up, begged him to _please Jake, please be okay, I need you to be okay please--_

You'd kept him alive for a couple of days in anxious hope and perhaps a need for a warm body in bed with you, no matter how still it was. You'd trickled water between his slack and pale lips, replenishing him like one would do a houseplant, because that's what he had been then, a fucking _plant_. And yet you couldn't just let him _die_ , withered up and shriveling into a husk of his former self. Jake had taught you the power of undeterred optimism and hope in the face of grisly situations. Jake had kept you going, kept you eating and breathing and living despite all the countless times where you'd wanted to collapse under the weight of the situation and let time take you. You couldn't have given up on him, not after all he had done for you. 

After a week, however, you hadn't been able to ignore the thinness in his ribs, or the sallow paleness in his cheeks. You'd had no way of getting food to him, not with your limited supplies and technology. You'd racked your brain of anything, stressed your intellect for any scrap of plan drained from your formerly unflappable ingenuity, only to come up with nothing. In a fit of desperation you had even resolved to grab a length of spare tubing and try to fashion a makeshift feeding tube, but your nerves had failed you the moment you'd pressed the knife to Jake's stomach and realized you _couldn't_ do this. You hadn't yet been mad enough to try something with a higher risk of killing Jake than helping him. 

Instead you'd mashed up some of the canned food and tried to push it through his slacked lips, begging to his deaf ears to _eat_ , _please Jake you have to eat you can't leave me not after all this, Jake, Jake please_ but it had been futile. You had been running out of food as it were, your time spent foraging cut back by caring for Jake, which additionally left you deprived of an extra pair of hands whenever you _did_ go out looking for food. 

As the second week of Jake's slumber continued you'd found that you had to face the painful, _horrible_ truth. It'd hurt you to see Jake starving and sick and dead to the world but you'd known it had been hurting him more. It had been cruelty to keep Jake alive like that, no matter your selfish reasoning. You'd known this, and after a night of deliberation and tears you had come to a crossroads between two horrible solutions. 

One would let nature take its course and leave yourself guilt-free but at the price of perpetuating Jake's slow and degrading pain. And the latter would tear into the salvaged scraps of your heart but would let Jake go quickly and quietly and _peacefully._

It'd taken you a lot longer than you'd dared admit to choose the latter. 

Grabbing a syringe and a vial of medication you and Jake had salvaged from the local burned out hospital shell a couple of months back, you'd sat on the edge of his bed and filled up the syringe with an adequate dosage to gently ease Jake to rest. You'd used the meds a couple of times before, albeit in smaller doses, when the overwhelming pressure of your situation had been too much, and you'd just needed the sedate bliss that the drug could provide. 

You'd pushed back his hair and kissed him one last time, debating whether you should take some drug for yourself in order to stop the shaking in your hands and fingers. 

Your lips had lingered a long while against Jake's, languishing in a warmth you knew you would never feel again. Finally, you'd pulled away. You'd then tied off his arm until a vein pulsed through his skin, and after piercing the needle through Jake's skin you had pressed down the plunger and released the drug into his system.

 

He'd died as you'd held him in arms that were back then flesh. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this hasn't updated in forever! But I hope you like this chapter <3

 

III. 

You weren't sure of the years or months that had passed since Jake died. Time was really never your forte, never something you paid much attention to. Post-Reckoning, time had been insignificant compared to whether you had enough food or water to last through the month and how many carapaces were clustered and clamoring outside your window. Numbers had been used for counting how many bullets Jake had left while fighting through a swarm of black and white-shelled bodies rather than measuring exactly how many seconds and millisecond it took for an enemy's lead-riddled brain to die. 

 

IV. 

Before the Reckoning you'd been somewhat of a dilettante with regards to robotics. It was little more than a hobby, just a skill you could harness to construct some cyborgs to bounce your rap skills off of. They were crude and rough and somewhat half-assed. Your speciality wasn't beauty or finery, as long as they performed their primary task, you considered them a success.

Post-Reckoning, however, things were different. You couldn't fritter away as much time making robots that were only suited to do a task rendered relatively useless in a post-apocalyptic earth. Even the sickest, sweetest rhymes couldn't feed you and Jake and protect you both from the burgeoning hordes of carapaces. 

So you'd ditched the rapbots, stripped them of all extraneous personality programming and rewired their circuitry until you could sufficiently channel all that surplus rapping skill into foraging strategies and the ability to behead a couple dozen or so threatening carapaces with their bare hands.  

It'd hurt to see the blank eyes and stark obedient voices of the bots who'd long been your only companions, but It was a sacrifice that you had to have made in order to secure the safety of you and Jake. You'd lost two of your friends, but if it had meant keeping Jake alive and safe, then you'd believed it to be entirely worth it.  

Post-Jake, however, things had again changed. 

You'd powered down the killbots  after using them one last time to help dig Jake's grave. You couldn't bear to look at them. You couldn't bear to remember how you'd wiped their personalities for the sake of transforming them into nothing more than mere tools. You couldn't bear thinking that you had sacrificed them to help you keep Jake safe, and that in the end you had even failed to do _that_. 

However, it hadn't take you long to consider constructing a new robot, and not one designed for rapping or foraging or killing or any of that shit. The loneliness and the guilt had been getting to you, it had been wearing you down to the point where you would often forgo searching for food to sit in Jake's bed and rip your nails into the sheets and cry for hours on end. 

Your hand had finally been forced when one day one of those fucking carapaces--at least you assumed it was a carapace, you'd never gotten a good look at the fucker--had somehow rigged some rudimentary pressure sensitive explosive under one of your habitual scouring grounds. Later you'd find the scorched cans of shaving cream debris and admire your enemy's ingenuity but at the time you were too busy screaming and trying to stem the tide of blood and sloughing flesh dripping from the bubbling stump of your left arm. 

You'd been sure you were a dead man that day, lying out in the frigid dark with your arm torn to shreds, and maybe deep down you'd wanted it, believing that this was your karma, what you deserved for not saving Jake. Maybe you'd wanted to die. 

But instead of admitting to the death and dust and decay that soon awaited you, you'd managed to claw yourself to your feet despite the shock clinging heavy to your muscles and weighing down your brain. 

By the time you'd gotten home you were blind with pain and a creeping infectious fever that left you at the mercy of bacterial nightmares for an uncountable number of days before some ham-fisted miracle decided to _fuck it_ and just let you live. 

With shaking hands you'd finally managed to clean the stumpy remains of your arm, stripping off the rotting and blackened tissue and bandaging it up with torn strips of old cotton shirts from your own closet. 

You couldn't bear to tear up Jake's old clothing. Even if it was to save your own life. You didn't deserve to taint anything of his with the consequences of your carelessness. 

 

V.

In the end, you had survived. 

For a moment, you'd thought to just let yourself starve, waste away and disappear. Living alone with only one arm was a surefire death sentence. It cut away your already meager foraging and defending skills in half, leaving you even more vulnerable than before to rapacious carapaces and the traitorous but inviting edge of your own sword. 

But something had kept you going. You labeled it as some sick sense of duty as the last leg of humanity, the final shred of an indomitable force puttering along with your unilateral living corpse at the helm.

In the end you'd removed the arm from the smaller of the killbots and modified it to your own frame. It had been slow going, working with only a single hand and your teeth to tune and process the materials needed to construct your new proxy limb. The worst part, though, had been attaching it. Wiring the arm to your nervous system had been no walk in the metaphorical park, and by the time it was soldered onto your arm your lips were a bitten and bloody mess. But even the throbbing pain in your mouth and shoulder and the exhaustion withering your body hadn't stopped you and you had pressed on until you could feel the curl and press of the metal fingers against your mesh palm. 

It had taken you weeks to even begin to become acclimated to the new extension of metal affixed to your body. It failed and broke more often then you'd like, and those moments when the thumb stopped working or the wrist locked up resulted in a new spattering of scars across your face and chest more often then not, but still it managed to keep you alive and kicking. Gradually, you'd fallen back into the routine you'd had before the loss of your flesh limb--with one noticeable difference. 

Modifying the arm and attaching it to your body, _successfully_ at that, had tripped the wires in your brain and sent your mental cogs into a gyrating dance of possibilities and what ifs. If you could construct a limb that could function as a human one, would something _more_ be well within the reach of your capabilities?

Something like a full bodied robot, like the killbots, except not. 

A robot like the ones in those ridiculous movies you and him used to watch to take your mind off  the stress and terror of your lives. 

A robot--well, you suppose the proper term would be a _cyborg_ \--like one of those dystopian cityscapes, hardly indistinguishable from your average living, breathing human. 

You hadn't know if it was possible for you, with your limited supplies and resources, to replicate the soft warmth of hands, or the subtle indent of overbite against lips, or the coarse and marbled edge to a voice lowered in husky adoration, but---

But there was no harm in trying. 


	3. Chapter 3

VI. 

You spent days now scouring the burned out and skeletal building in the city, stripping them of copper wiring and metal plating and any other materials that you could possibly need from within the plaster walls.  

The sky is always dark, clouded by what you presume is a thick layer of ash and dust. You don't remember the last time you've seen the sun. 

Sometimes when you're standing out in the backyard, hemmed in small by a flimsy wooden fence, you look up and there's a hint of setting red amidst the clouds. A finger of hope bleeding through the sky. 

 You'd buried Jake out here, amidst the barren soil that he'd tried so hard to coax to grow and flourish in life. 

 

VII. 

Eyeballs are difficult. They've always been difficult. You'd usually forgo them, along with other petty and frivolous decorations but you weren't trying to reconstruct a killbot this time. You weren't trying to make something that valued function over form. 

You knew, of course, as you worked on perfecting the metal basis of the new cyborg--you knew it wouldn't be exactly the same, even if you were to flawlessly replicate Jake's physical form. 

He--it--he---no, _it_ \--whatever. Nothing will ever replace him. No matter how close you wire the circuits, no matter how much fine-tuned sensitivity you put into the body, it will not replace Jake. Nothing could ever, ever in a billion years replace Jake. No amount of programming could replicate all the mannerisms and quirks that had endeared you to him. 

He may be an outwardly perfect and indistinguishable copy of a young human male, but he wont be _your_ Jake.

Maybe that's not your goal, though. You've understood all along that the product of this maddened process won't be a replica of Jake, and yet this recognition has not stopped you at any point at all. 

In the end, perhaps you just want _something_ beside you. You know it won't be Jake, but you're still using Jake as a blueprint, as a recipe for your new companion, because Jake has been the only thing in your entire life that you've loved more than yourself. 

Even though the central processor should really beg more of your attention, in the end a large percentage of your focus gets drawn towards the eyes. 

 

VIII.

Some night it _hurts_. When the roiling smog filled clouds above you managed to condense into a mockery of burning rain it _hurts,_ the joint where your flesh meets metal aching and making you tear scars into the skin. 

You killed Jake. You did. Even if the accident hadn't been your fault, even if you couldn't have prevented it, you still killed Jake. Even if it was a choice between keeping him alive as a slowly wasting vegetable or giving him a quick and painless death, you still killed Jake. You'd been the one to push the drug into his veins, you'd been the one to hold him until he died, you'd been the one to bury him, you you you you _you._

 

IV. 

The robot is almost completed. 

The eyes are molded and fitted into the rubber sockets, synthetic skin closed around them. You're not sure how they're going to look, how anything is really going to look, until you power it on. 

You know it won't be Jake when you turn it on. 

Jake is dead. Jake is gone-- _gone_ , never coming back. The robot wouldn't replace him. The robot could _never_ replace him. 

But maybe you could chisel out some form of meager happiness with the Jakebot. Before the carapaces find you. Before an infection takes hold. Before the earth's poison chokes you out. A little strand to hold in your palm and kiss before it's snipped away. 

 

X. 

You close your eyes. You take a deep breath. You flip the switch.

His eyes open and while they're not the same shade of hazel-green that you remember, they're still beautiful. 


End file.
